Deciphering Cryptozoology

On the one hand, Loren Coleman is a skeptic, firmly grounded in scientific principles. On the other hand, his particular branch of science, cryptozoology, gives equal credence to suspected bird species, say, and near-mythical creatures like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Cryptozoology—the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated—is frequently treated as an easily dismissed bastard child of science. If that’s the case, then Coleman is the unrepentant modern father of the field. Besides authoring nine books on the topic, he also owns the International Cryptozoology Museum, which he runs out of his home in Portland, Maine. A former psychiatric social worker and university professor, he now makes his living writing, lecturing, and consulting about cryptozoology, which he’s studied since before the word existed in English. Coleman’s out to show that there’s much more to cryptozoology than chasing down Bigfoot or plumbing the depths of Loch Ness for its most famous resident.

In March of 1960, I saw a science fiction film called Half Human, by Ishiro Hondu. This was his first science fiction film after a career in documentary filmmaking, and it was about the Abominable Snowman, filmed among the native Ainu people of Japan. I saw that film on a Friday night, and when I went into school the next week, I asked my teachers what was this about the Abominable Snowman? They all told me, “Don’t waste your time,” “Don’t pay attention to it.” Even though I was only 11 or 12, I heavily questioned authority.
I started investigating crytpozoological cases then. Because I was so small, I would do this with the help of a game warden so people would actually talk to me. I investigated black panther reports in Illinois, mystery cat reports in Indiana, Bigfoot cases, giant snake reports and other strange cases throughout the Midwest…anything that was a little abnormal that newspaper people wrote up as weird animal stories. I understood them as cryptozoology.

I very specifically chose the university I went to—Southern Illinois University in Carbondale—because there was a folklorist there named John Allen who had been doing research on the Illinois bottomland apes.

Yeah, in Cryptozoology A to Z (Fireside Books, 1999), I talk about them in terms of the animals of discovery—the mountain gorilla, the okapi (a member of the giraffe family with zebra-like stripes, found and catalogued by modern science in 1901), the coelacanth (a prehistoric fish thought to be extinct for 65 million years when found very much alive in 1938). Those are creatures that people knew about, that they reported, that scientists went looking for and “discovered.” They dot cryptozoology, but once the animal is found it drifts across this line into zoology, and the zoologists forget that it was ever doubted.
There have been really amazing discoveries in the recent past, like the saola, which is a rather large goat-antelope that was discovered in an area of Vietnam near the Laotian border known as the Lost World. Or the discovery of the fossils of the Hobbit, homo floresiensis, in 2003. It was a whole species of human-like beings that lived at the same time as humans.
The giant squid used to be “The Kraken.” It wasn’t until the 1880s that it became a known species, and it wasn’t even filmed alive until 2006. So some of these animals still remain mysterious.

Well, I think there are generational gaps in zoology. There were a lot of Victorian explorers who were amateur naturalists, amateur zoologists. They explored different parts of Africa and when they came across a new animal, they’d send off the bones or skins to Europe and get them classified as a new animal. It was the first wave of cryptozoology.
After that and through the 1950s, science was very reflective of the Eisenhower, McCarthy, Nixonian era in the United States. By that I mean there was a conceited notion that there weren’t any unexplored areas left in the world, and so there weren’t any undiscovered animals.
But then something very revolutionary happened in the 1960s; there was a conscious revolution around the world. We came into the Kennedy Era in which there was much more openness to talking about everything, whether it was politics, the justification of wars, or stigmas regarding sex. I think it also occurred in the natural world, in natural history. Instead of thinking that all of the animals in the world had been discovered, there was a new environmental consciousness that led to an explosion of animal discoveries from the ‘60s through the ‘90s—the megamouth shark, the Chacoan peccary, the saola. I think we came out of a period of isolation, and cryptozoology happened to benefit from it. Zoologists and naturalists started taking interest in cryptozoology, whether they called it that or not.
The current generation of cryptozoologists and writers are very much a product of the 1960s—conscientious objectors, hippies, politically left-wing, not in any way conservative and held back. We were radicals, ones who questioned authority and questioned whether science really knew all that they were telling us. So part of that questioning authority really slipped into the way we view zoology and anthropology.

Yeah, I call them “celebrity cryptids.” I think the word celebrity really captures it. People are interested in what Brad Pitt’s doing, not what his understudy or some other minor actor is doing. In the same way, people know the words Yeti, Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster. So if you’re telling them about reports of a bird—a warbler, say—that’s been seen by the native peoples of the Congo, and how zoologists and cryptozoologists are studying that and think they’re going to find it (which happened last year), you don’t get people in the media or even in the general public interested in that. Because it’s not splashy, it doesn’t get a lot of press. And yet there are snakes, there are birds, there are species of dolphins that are only known from eyewitness reports. Several new species of lemur have recently been discovered. New animals are discovered all the time, and some of them are found employing cryptozoologically-based methods of using eyewitness accounts to guide an investigation in a particular direction.

My whole contention is that people mainly forget, and then they think, “Oh, some scientist discovered a new animal last year, what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that it’s found using exactly the same methods that are being used by people searching for the Sasquatch, or the lake monster in whatever lake, or sea serpents. But because we haven’t found what’s supposedly the big one, people forget that cryptozoology is successful. Of course we’ve found the big one; we found the okapi, we found the mountain gorilla. But people forget that, they almost have amnesia once these discoveries are made, and they keep saying, “Cryptozoology doesn’t work because you haven’t found Yeti” [laughs]. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.

When I was at the university and I would write a paper about the survival of Neanderthals, which was just a way for me to look at cryptozoology, my professor thought it was an interesting idea and he gave me a grade on it, but he gave me a grade mostly upon the idea and not upon my good research and my several dozen references and all of that. Whereas now what’s happening is those people who are in universities, those people I’m talking to when I go to the Royal Albert Museum or the American Museum of Natural History, are professors in universities, are college students. So we have people in the mainstream who are interested in cryptozoology, who grew up on cryptozoology.

I’m not interested in ghosts, not interested in UFOs. Ghosts don’t leave footprints. I’m interested in cryptids, because they leave footprints, they leave fecal matter, they leave hair, and sometimes, if you’re not being hoaxed or being confused by a run-of-the-mill, mundane animal, it might lead you to a new animal, a new species. I understand that a lot of people like to overlap the paranormal and the anomalistic, but for me cryptozoology—the study of hidden or unknown animals—is a scientific method by which you learn about new animals that have yet to be discovered.

No doubt about it. I came from a background of anthropology first and zoology second and then psychiatric social work. This field is very much driven by what we call ethno-known animals, that is animals that are only known to cryptozoology through human experience, or eyewitness accounts. It’s not like an animal just plops out of the blue and into a science or zoology book. It definitely has to be seen, it has to be studied, it has to be photographed, it has to be captured. One way this information comes to us is through folk tales, news reports, songs, folklore, legends, witness interviews and all that kind of ethnographic material that really requires analysis and investigation from a zoological point of view to get some insight.
Linguists look for clues in language—the words locals use to describe the crytpid, translations of the name, as well as things like locality names. Is there a Monkey Hollow, a Monster Ridge, a Devil’s Cove? All of those can lead you to clues about experiences in the area that are related to cryptozoology.
One of the main tenets of cryptozoology is to interview the local people—the Victorians called them “natives”—you interviewed the local residents and tried to figure out whether the animals they were talking about were part of their spiritual world, part of their religious world, or part of the natural world. You look for the tangibles of the intangibles.

As soon as you set up a question with absolutes you’re going to get into trouble. There are many parts of science where there is only theoretical proof, only theorems and ideas and peoples’ thoughts. Take life or water on Mars, for example. There are theories that it may or may not exist there. But just because they think it’s not there, people aren’t going to stop looking for it.
The same goes for cryptozoology. I can say that I don’t think there are any large animals in a given lake, even if some people say they’ve seen them. But I’m going to be open-minded enough to go ahead and gather reports and look for it. That doesn’t mean I absolutely think we’re going to find something, because maybe I think the lake is too shallow and doesn’t have the life necessary to support a large animal. But I don’t know all of the possibilities. I don’t think that is much different from science.
In fact, I think cryptozoology is traditional science. If you take away the word and look at the way animals were discovered before the word was invented, they went out and they talked to the native peoples: “Have you seen anything around here that you don’t know, that you haven’t eaten but you have seen?” That’s exactly how okapi was discovered, and the mountain gorilla, a lot of other animals that were found out by regular explorers and zoologists in traditional science. Cryptozoology is a method to explore and a way to find out about new animals. We are not creating left wing, new science. It’s seen as weird, but cryptozoology is just part of the scientific method of getting more information.

I think it’s just a word, but it’s often one that is used to describe so-called “amateur” scientists. You are labeled a cryptozoologist if you don’t have a PhD, or if you haven’t published enough papers or gotten institutional funding. But I’ve seen zoologists do cryptozoological work, and amateurs do zoology work. They are finding new animals and they are using cryptozoological methods. It gets to be an elitist attitude and some chairs of some departments of zoology are very skittish of any cryptozoological method being labeled with that name cryptozoology. In their sixty, seventy or eighty years, cryptozoology has been tied to Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster—animals that they consider to be mere myth. Whereas a lot of the young cryptozoologists that I know who are wildlife biologists or in PhD programs grew up with, and accept the possibility of, Bigfoot. They understand cryptozoology as just a way to look for animals.

Well, I don’t really like to talk about that, because it’s not important to me. I see myself as an investigative journalist and scientist who’s involved in studying these creatures. A lot of people get into the field because they’ve had a remarkable Bigfoot encounter or cryptozoological encounter. I didn’t come into it that way. I haven’t seen the Loch Ness Monster, the Lake Champlain Monster or Bigfoot, but I’ve had enough to keep me going.

I’m trying to keep the tea from coming through my nose from laughter [laughs]. Cryptozoology A to Z is by far the most successful book that I’ve ever written, and I got a little advance in 1999, and only started receiving royalties last year. In the space of a year I might get under $1,000 in royalties. The advances keep going down, too, because the publishing business is on the rocks, like everything else. So for the past couple of years I’ve sort of zeroed out in terms of income and expenses, but I wouldn’t give it up for the world. I’m finally doing what I want. I’m telling people about cryptozoology, writing about it.

Yeah, myself and a dozen other people in the world get to call themselves professional cryptozoologists. When I went up against the IRS while they were auditing my 2005 taxes, half of my six-month battle was convincing them that I was actually a professional cryptozoologist. My accountant and defenders and I were taking in tapes of my television appearances and copies of my books as evidence to prove that cryptozoology was actually a field.

They accepted it, and they accepted my profession and my income that way. What they disallowed and still were a little “nudgy” about is they see my museum as a hobby, because it’s physically a part of my home.

Deciphering Cryptozoology :The New York review of ideas